REVIEW: DEFAMATION FACTORY

Since the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting of October 27th, the Anti Defamation League of the B’nai Brith (ADL) has been welcomed in all the major media outlets as a respectable representative of not only the Jewish community, but also of “a world without hate,” a phrase cleverly trademarked by the powerful organization. Somebody with no prior knowledge of the ADL or its director Jonathan Greenblatt could easily believe that they represent and teach tolerance. This has little to do with reality as Kaiter Enless's book Defamation Factory makes clear.
The ADL is a powerful organization that allegedly aims to combat hate and more precisely anti-Semitism. As Tom Sunic puts it in the preface, if anti-Semitism did not exist, the ADL would probably invent it as the outside threat is an important cement for Jewish identity. Without it, the Jewish community would likely lose its cohesion and would eventually erode. This explains why Jewish organizations have sometimes supported the rise of anti-Semitic groups like John Beattie’s Canadian Nazi Party.

As hate and anti-Semitism are concepts difficult to define, the ADL has been fighting anybody on the right who is not an ardent Zionist. Abe Foxman expanded the definition of anti-Semitism to delegitimizing Israel or criticizing the Zionist entity.

As Enless puts it, that would mean equating all Jews to Israel and any Israeli policy to the unified will of all Jews -- an obvious absurdity. A comparison with Quebec could be drawn: using this way of thinking, anyone opposing Quebec’s independence would be considered a Quebecophobe, even if he was himself a Quebecer.

Over the last few decades, religious leaders, political activists, dissident scientists, and generally anyone who does not share the vision of America becoming a jovial multiracial utopia has been targeted by this sinister group that is not ashamed of using smears and outright lies. The fact that this multimillion dollar lobby can bring all its weight to bear on a single individual in order to break him, socially, financially, and legally, is not enough; the ADL admitted in the past to using facts they knew were false in order to crush their opponents.

Smears

The example of the populist Lyndon LaRouche comes to mind. He was boycotted, saw his opponents receive large sums of money, and was eventually prosecuted after being falsely labeled an anti-Semite by the ADL.

Other tricks the ADL have often employed are guilt by association and digging up skeletons in somebody’s past. We can think of many dissidents who were attacked not because of what they said or did, but because of the people they were in touch with. Similarly, even if someone changes and evolves, he can never earn redemption in the eyes of the ADL judges. For the ADL, David Duke will always be the "Louisiana Klansman" even if, since he left the Klan, much has happened and Dr. Duke has changed a great deal.

Some two thousand years ago, Jesus gave us some good advice when he said: "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her." If the ADL can attack somebody on his having kept company with disreputable people in his past, it must be that it is spotless in these regards!

Endless who has studied the history of the infamous League tells quite a different story. The very foundation of this organization shows a clear lack of morality and demonstrates that, despite its claims, it has never been a paragon of virtue. The League was set up after a trial in which the accused, a Jewish man by the name of Leo M. Frank, had been found guilty of the rape and murder of a 13 year old employee on April 26th 1913 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Despite having tried to put the blame on a Black employee, Frank was found guilty and sentenced to death for this brutal rape. However, some Jewish associates managed to put pressure on officials to commute the death sentence into life imprisonment, a wish that was granted. But this leniency only enraged a band of vigilantes, who proceeded to lynch the rapist in front of his victim's house.

The Anti-Defamation League has thus been founded by the Jewish B’nai Brith not to fight defamation, but to defend Frank whose guilt was confirmed by overwhelming evidence.

The first official campaign of the ADL was launched against the industrialist Henry Ford, who owned the Dearborn Independent, a newspaper critical of Jewish power. In the early 1920s he published and distributed The International Jew, a four-volume set of booklets outlining the extent of Jewish influence. It was Aaron Sapiro, an agricultural reformer who launched the judicial crusade against Ford. The industrialist responded by simply retracting his book and leaving the Jewish issue to other advocates.

Presented as a poor victim of Ford’s violent anti-Semitism, it turned out that Sapiro was later arrested and charged with a conspiracy racket, linking him with Al Capone. This "poor victim," it turned out, was deeply involved in the criminal underworld.

This connection with organized crime is documented in the history of the League. For example, during the Second World War, New York’s underworld launched a deadly war against the German Bund and its sympathizers at the request of the mobster Meyer Lansky whose daughter sat on the ADL’s board of directors.

Lansky was not the only underworld superstar to be recognized and praised by the ADL, Moe Dalitz received the Torch of Liberty in 1982 and later the Award of Philanthropist of the Year. More recently the ADL supported its friend March Rich, responsible for the most important tax evasion scandal in American history. Rich, who was a personal friend of the Clinton clan and Abe Foxman, ADL’s former director, was eventually granted pardon, but once again it proves that when it comes to morality the ADL cannot give anyone lessons.

Throughout its history, the ADL was also regularly accused of interfering with federal inquiries and of putting pressure on the FBI. In fact, the ADL was involved in the Jonathan Pollard spy ring that divulged state secrets to Israel. They not only defended him when he was caught, but had helped him actively before. Thus goes the patriotic varnish of the League.

Chomsky: ADL "target"

Furthermore, in 1993, an FBI investigation found that the ADL was a private spy company acting illegally. Over 10,000 people and 600 civic organizations had been investigated by the ADL, which had accumulated huge files on them. Those files contained much information obtained illegally and they were not only targeting people from the right, but also leftists like Noam Chomsky and organizations like La Raza, the NAACP, and the Asian Law Caucus. Caught red-handed, the ADL only got a slap on the wrist and was able to resume its activities. In terms of immorality, Enless could have included the story of Cathy Ainsworth, the pregnant school teacher and KKK member, reportedly killed in a trap set up by the ADL, but it seems that the author decided not to include all the wrongdoings of the League, otherwise the book would have been twice as thick.

More recently, the Internet has become a major focus of the ADL, with the organization working for an effective online censorship to defeat "the Web of Hate." Working in partnership with Google, YouTube and other major Internet players, it has become very influential on what content can be seen, what should be censored, and what should simply be left in a black hole with no possible reference. But free speech, without restrictions, is the very basis of a healthy democracy, as Thomas Jefferson once said.

The persecution and silencing of dissidents in a Soviet-like way and the imposition of newspeak in the public discourse give us a glimpse into the grim future that is awaiting us if nothing is done to stop the ADL and its totalitarian agenda.